We had a 7-year-old boy play the Star Realms game for the first time with 3 adults and another young boy and he totally beat us all. Sometimes nitty-gritty playing can win the game.

Our Chemistry teacher loves to try new ways to grab her students’ interest. So I sent her a link to an online chemistry game and she booked the computer lab to bring her students up to try it out. They loved it!

The families attending loved the Minecraft Boxhead sessions – lots of children running around the library with their Boxheads on! They also loved the card games and a round of ‘Forbidden Island’.

Even though ours attracted mostly kids (as we are located right in front of the school and get a large after-school crowd) we had one elderly patron who absolutely loved playing the giant games. She stayed for quite awhile playing them all with the kids.

Teens loved the game tournament and it encouraged team play.

A brother and sister came in with their dad. The younger brother built the TALLEST Jenga tower, which included the Jenga box, another board game, and a handful of books. This is a very quiet boy and he cheered at his accomplishment then proceeded to come up to the desk and tell us all about it.

One of our circulation staff wrote the adventure for our D&D game and it was SUPERB!

“You sank my battleship,” we were playing Uno.

When I introduced a kid (~10yo) to King of Tokyo and we played around with his siblings, he said: “This is the best game I’ve ever played.” Then we played Munchkin, and he said: “THIS is the best game I’ve ever played”

It was a great opportunity for librarians to share their favorite games with students and with each other. But it was even better to learn new games from the students who brought in their own.

We had groups join us who had never thought of using the library as such a venue. They have since asked to create a regular RPG club and are helping to develop the programme. Others are looking towards attending/creating gaming evenings, tournaments, etc.

My favorite part was seeing a family come in and all play Minecraft together. A father was helping his young daughter figure out how to play, then he hopped on the server and started playing with her. It was really nice to see families all playing classic video games out in the arcade together as well.

A professor of German attended our event with a vocab sheet of words relevant to the game and useful negotiating phrases and helped students play Catan in German. Also, the winner of our no-elimination Catan tournament erased a six-victory-point deficit in the final game and won in the second tiebreaker.

The kids love playing the old video game systems, most of which their parents played with. The parents like talking “shop” about vintage video games with someone who had the consoles as well.

ActivitiesWhich of the following activities were part of your International Games Week program?Some of the other activities included:
Cosplay contest, virtual and augmented reality play, arcade machines, trivia, theater games, escape room games, coding, and Ozobots.

OutcomesWhat were the outcomes of your IGW Program?

IGW LibrariesWhich of the following describes your library?

Does your library have a game collection?
Which video games consoles does your library own?

IGW Committee GoalsInternational Games Week is run by a small group of volunteers and our goal is to improve this event each year. We have read your comments. Our goals for next year will be to provide a poster with more room for your logos and a social media template/plan.

We’ll put out a call in February 2018 for blog posts and help with worldwide events.

International Games Week 2018-2020We are setting the dates for the next three years to help you prepare for your events.

2018 – November 4th through November 10th2019 – November 3rd through November 9th2020 – November 8th through November 14th

These dates are flexible. Feel free to host your event outside of these dates if that is best for your library and its patrons.